Today’s microchips contain features nearing atomic length scales. The ability to see inside them is valuable for manufacturing, quality control, and security inspection, but as they continue to shrink, the techniques available to image them can’t always keep up. Fine-scale features can be imaged with electron microscopy, but that requires the analysis and then removal of one thin slice of the chip at a time. X-ray diffraction patterns can be used to visualize the 3D structure—in a method known as ptychographic tomography—without the need to destroy the chip. But until recently, ptychography could only provide a resolution of about 15 nm, not precise enough to capture the tiny transistors in modern microchips. Now, an advancement to that method by Tomas Aidukas, at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, and colleagues has pushed the lensless imaging technique to a record 4 nm resolution.
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